A forty-year, roughly two-hundred-piece Franz West survey, launched last fall at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and now at Tate Modern in London, brings home to viewers the extraordinary formal range of this quirky, provocative, and influential Austrian artist. Bound by no one medium, he was equally at home (or, more likely, ill at ease) with sculpture, painting, drawing, graphic work, installation, furniture design, video, and performance—or any combination thereof. West, who died in 2012 at the age of sixty-five (after many years of hard living), dropped out of school at sixteen and almost immediately entered Vienna’s growing avant-garde world. Ambition, coupled with an impulsive, anarchic streak and a don’t-give-a-damn attitude characterized his art from the beginning.
West was born in Vienna in 1947, the son of a Communist coal merchant of Serbian origin, Ferdinand Zokan, with whom he did not get along at all, and Emilie West, a cultivated, warm, artistic Jewish dentist, whom he greatly loved (and whose name he took). Those postwar years in Austria were grim, but the general air of disorder and breakdown had positive aspects. It ultimately opened things up and provided space for a radical, anti-establishment art in a city that was set in its artistic ways. West, largely self-taught, was strongly attracted to the new art scene, but in his early days he was clearly a peripheral character.1 An odd duck who at first sold his work in the street, he took drugs and drank heavily, got beaten up and thrown out of bars, and seemed to many just a satellite of his flamboyant older half-brother, performance artist Otto Kobalek. West, however, was charming, inspired, and possessed of a real—if unorthodox and complicated—talent for friendship (attested to in the catalogue by the recollections of numerous friends and collaborators). He hung in there, and by the 1980s found his work increasingly exhibited, both in Austria and abroad.
Key to West’s development was his reaction to Vienna’s best-known avant-garde group, the Actionists—Günter Brus, Hermann Nitsch, Otto Muehl, Rudolf Schwarzkogler, and others. There is nothing to catch people’s eye like pissing in public and drinking your urine, shitting while singing the national anthem (again publicly), and covering your body with shit while masturbating—all of which Günter Brus did. Unsurprisingly, such artists received a great deal of attention, something that West very much wanted for himself. They, however, were not terribly interested in him, perhaps because they sensed his lack of adulation. While West liked the aggressive, performative aspect of the Actionists, their emphasis on the body, and their desire to offend the bourgeoisie, he rejected what was, to his way of thinking, their self-indulgent seriousness, their Christ-like posturing, and their obsession with blood, pain, mutilation, and suffering. He wanted something equally powerful but lighter and considerably more casual. The Pompidou’s Christine Macel, co-curator of the exhibition, refers to West’s desire to become “a dandy with an elegant and rebellious body of work and an unpredictable intelligence, at once frivolous and intellectual.”2 A certain studied idleness, in the mode of Duchamp, was part of his artistic affect. Macel remarks, “Sitting down and lying down were also West’s greatest sources of inspiration. This was a matter of necessity as much as of inclination, for his health sometimes forced him to adopt such states of otium.”3 For all of that, West was remarkably productive.